The Only Consolation
by KissTheBoy7
Summary: Post-Merano, Freddie finds a new vice, and a not so new friend. Krispy Kreme and Walter. What's so bad about that? Walter/Freddie. TW for mental illness. Oneshot.


**A/N: This is terribly self indulgent of me but yeah I'm just going to casually post it here. Also, this is another nod to the Freddie Donut Porn fic, although not nearly as graphic as the last one. Enjoy? Review possibly?**

* * *

Freddie thinks that this weird stigma people seem to have against comfort food is overrated.

He also thinks that most people are assholes.

It's two years post-Merano and he's mostly alone, and Florence won't answer his calls, and Walter keeps him in work but never too much of it and he's sick of beating off to that Russian bastard every time he takes a shower, or can't fall asleep, or when he's just so fucking_lonely _and he's got too much pride to just call it what it is, so he tells himself he's just horny and he thinks about Sergievsky's tight lips and how he'd suck him off underneath the board and it's probably the only sex he's going to get for the rest of his life.

Freddie isn't even sure he _likes _sex but he knows he loves pastries.

It's the sugar-glaze, if he's perfectly honest. He's always had the worst sweet tooth and without a woman in the house (because what woman could he ever put up with that wasn't Florence Vassy?) to nag about calories and saturated fat and watch your diet, watch your weight, go take a walk Freddie or you're going to get fat just sitting around all day like some creepy hermit -

Without Florence he has no one to keep trim for anyways, and he stops caring about much, stops having anything to get up for except the promise of a caffeine overdose.

So he does take walks. He takes walks to the nearest donut shop, which happens to be Krispy Kreme, and buys one and then two and sometimes three and a large coffee, or a frappe if he's feeling frisky, and sits around all day again except now he does it in public, or as public as he can be sitting in the corner of a donut shop at ten in the morning to four in the afternoon, playing chess in his head, reading the paper with the halfhearted nonchalance of a college student.

Freddie never graduated college. Hell, he can hardly even say he went.

(He was a genius so it didn't matter, at the time.)

But his career's finally gone down the tubes, and now he's stuck being Walter fucking De Coursey's sarcastic yet loveable co-anchor, and if he's going to be flashing those sickly smiles all night he's got to ingest something sweet, hasn't he?

Freddie really doesn't know why he's trying to justify this. It's just a fucking donut.

Or... a box of them.

It gets to be sort of a problem, because there always seems to be glaze, or chocolate or filling or_something _on him, incriminating evidence on his nose and fingers and cheek and chin and lips. And he can feel Walter's amused eyes lighting there, watching as he licks it away. His cheeks are pink. He doesn't know what he has to be embarrassed about.

It's just a few extra pounds... fifteen. Fifteen extra pounds. He stares down at the scale and counts to ten, and pinches the bridge of his nose, and licks the glaze from his lower lip and feels like the loneliest piece of shit in the entire world.

Nobody calls him back except for Walter anymore, and who honestly wants to talk to Walter?

He considers asking him for head, more than once. They used to be like that, sometimes, pretty regularly actually for a while. But that was Bangkok. This, this is a lot less exciting, a lot more confining.

Freddie smooths his shirt down over his belly self-consciously. He pokes it. It's soft, and jiggles a little, and he tells himself that he is not nauseated by everything that's changed, his body and his stagnant mind rotting away over mindless days and nights spent staring out windows and listening to the inane chatter of the residents of Brooklyn, and wondering what Anatoly looks like when he fucks Florence into their bed back in England or wherever they are now.

He needs to do something real. He needs to break himself out of this insane, monotonous cycle.

He needs to make it_mean _something but the only thing that means anything to him anymore is Florence, and sometimes that damn Russian with his dark eyes and his tight-lipped smiles.

Also donuts. Also coffee.

Chess doesn't even exist anymore, except in his head. There are no worthy opponents here. He's beaten them all - and the rest are too young, too cocky. He'd been one of them once, except he'd actually had the talent, the driven mind.

(Where has his mind gone? What is he anymore?)

Florence would tell him he was overthinking things. She would shake her head, fond but wary._Freddie._She would sigh, and kiss his hair and ask him if he's showered today, if he's taken his medication. He hasn't in months, but that's not really the point. It's not like he's ever been that enthusiastic about pill-popping. It's just antidepressants, it's just - it's stupid.

He doesn't need pills to get up in the morning, just coffee. A stack of empty, sticky boxes growing by his door that he's afraid to get rid of because he doesn't want anyone to see him carrying them out.

He doesn't need those goddamn pills.

He doesn't need anyone else to be alive, to draw in another breath, to fill his lungs and force himself to stare himself in the eye in the mirror, and pinch his biceps and _breathe, breathe, _and Florence still hasn't called him back, so fuck her, fuck her, he doesn't need her.

He doesn't need Walter, who sometimes comes to drag him out of his apartment now, sometimes out of bed. He takes the boxes with him when he leaves, and when he returns there's always another, and he looks almost worried and Freddie thinks that that's fucking hilarious because Walter De Coursey is a soulless bastard and suddenly, apparently, he's worried about _Freddie Trumper's _feelings, as though anyone has any reason to think that Freddie Trumper has ever had feelings beyond rage, pride, and vague amusement.

Walter's teeth leave faint marks on his skin, on his neck and his chest and his thighs. He never bites overly hard. Freddie thinks it's good that he's not the one biting, because he probably wouldn't stop, wouldn't know to, wouldn't care to until his teeth met and he'd cleaved his skin in two, tasted his blood and spat it out and gone to get himself another donut from the kitchen.

Freddie doesn't need anyone. He's a grown fucking adult, not a child.

He snaps one day, tells him that he doesn't need a fucking babysitter. Doesn't need anyone, anything. Walter holds him down, pins him to the wall and Freddie remembers dimly when he would have been strong enough to knock him of, knock him out, send him to the hospital. Now he's just pitiful.

He kicks and screams like a child. But he's not.

He swears to God that he's not.

Freddie takes to sneaking off in the middle of the night, walking up to the Krispy Kreme on the corner where they're always so happy to see him, so unnaturally cheerful. Probably because he's singlehandedly paying most of their weekly checks.

He sneaks out of the apartment while Walter is snoring, he stuffs his face until he could be sick, he washes it down with something cold and sickly sweet.

He stops showing up at the studio on weekends. Then on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Then Mondays. Then at all.

Freddie doesn't fucking care. Freddie doesn't need anyone.

Freddie gets lonely, though, even with Walter holding him against his chest while he's sobbing, while he's raving. He gets awfully lonely. He doesn't know what the hell is wrong with him, what he did to deserve this.

Why the hell do people hate comfort food so much?

Why does everyone always have to shit on the things that make him feel like he's not so empty, not so pointless, not so fucking abandoned all the time, even when he wasn't?

Freddie says to hell with them.

Freddie takes his meds. He takes them with his coffee in the morning. It's a medium now instead of a large. A large makes him sick.

He eats three donuts and then two. He eats one, when he's not feeling too well. When the meds make him dizzy, when Walter is expecting him and he needs to run. He eats one. Sometimes only half of it.

Freddie stops calling Florence Vassy. He stops thinking about her, or about her new boyfriend. He decides he hates them both, which is just like him and makes Walter laugh.

Freddie likes Walter's laugh, shockingly. He likes his weaselly way of talking, the way he gets everything he wants. They're so alike sometimes that it's uncanny, except that Walter is willing to play it a lot dirtier than he is, and somehow Freddie manages to keep the job he hasn't showed up to in months and he's got a suspicion - well, no, he knows that Walter has everything to do with it.

Freddie kind of loves the way Walter will get him whatever he wants, and smack the shit out of him when he's being an asshole.

He also kind of loves that Walter doesn't need to use his fists to make him hurt, to make him feel things.

He's got a silver tongue but clumsy fingers. Freddie teaches Walter how to play chess, partially out of boredom, mostly just to laugh at him.

Freddie doesn't mind his new pants size very much, he finds. He still needs his coffee to wake up in the morning. He still has a weakness for Krispy Kreme donuts.

Walter has a key to his apartment that he probably stole, and Freddie should probably be worried about that.

Freddie loves the way that Walter comes home to him every day. He loves it when he can't tell their possessions apart - he loves that they never talk about the boxes that he carts his shit in with except to complain when they're tripping over them every day for a week straight until finally they disappear.

Freddie kind of loves that stupid bastard which is really, really disgusting.

But he's got a reason to take that next breath, and the one after that.

Walter and Krispy Kreme, his guardian angels.

Freddie isn't a grateful person. He doesn't do that sentimental bullshit, doesn't write letters he'll never send to lovers past or to Florence, whatever she had been to him.

He finds one day that there's a ring on his finger, all shiny silver, thick and permanent.

He wonders vaguely how Walter got it on his finger without his noticing.

He shrugs, and lifts an iced coffee to his lips, and rolls a couple of pills in his hand and thinks that he was right. People are assholes, and pastries are delicious, and it is five years post-Merano, and the sun is bright and he doesn't need Walter, but he's not going to complain as long as he's got him.


End file.
